The youth vote doesn’t belong to Trudeau — or anyone else

Students from across Canada try to cross a barricade during a protest on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday, Oct. 24, 2016. Protesters were calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to kill the Kinder Morgan pipeline project. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

No matter what they do, millennials just can’t seem to get political engagement right. When they don’t vote, they’re ignored by politicians. When they do show up and passionately express their views, they’re encouraged to sit down and be more respectful.

Recently, 99 millennial activists got arrested on Parliament Hill and others symbolically turned their backs on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at an young workers event. Rather than condemn them, perhaps it’s time we started viewing young people as the influential voting block they might have been in 2015 — and could be again in 2019.

A year ago, young people were momentarily celebrated for finally showing up to the polls, reversing a 20-year downward trend in youth voter turnout. Fifty-seven per cent of 18 to 29 year olds voted in 2015, up from 42 per cent in 2011.

Although the Liberals were quick to claim victory over this significant increase in youth voter turnout, a recent report from Samara Canada suggests that it wasn’t an increased focus on young voters by the Liberals — or by any political party — that led young people to the polls.

In fact, in 2015 political parties did what they’ve always done. They focused on mobilizing older voters who are more consistent in their voting patterns, and ignored young voters: “Only 52 per cent of young Canadians reported contact from parties, compared with 82 per cent of the oldest cohort,” says the Samara report. In fact, more young people came out to vote (57 per cent) than were contacted by political parties (52 per cent) during the campaign.

It’s likely that a desire for change, hype about Trudeau and the groundwork laid by non-partisan, get-out-the-youth-vote initiatives actually made the difference in youth voter turnout in 2015 — not a change in tactics by political parties. Will young people make voting a habit and, if they do, who they will choose to vote for in 2019? It’s anyone’s guess.

If political parties make a conscious choice in 2019 to view millennials as a voting block and reach out to a lot more of them during the campaign then they did in 2015, it certainly could establish long-term voting habits and partisan preferences among young voters. But that strategy won’t be effective if young people aren’t valued as a voting block long before campaign time.

Protesters getting detained on the Hill, a few young people turning their backs on the PM — these things don’t necessarily signal a full-on revolt by millennials against the current government. But it could be a sign of things to come.

How will we be able to tell that young people are being seen as a valuable voting block by parties over the next three years? You might see smart politicians starting to show up where young people are. They might actually start listening to them. They might use what they hear to shift their policy priorities. And you might see the Liberal government start to spend more money on issues that determine how young people vote.

On the first point we aren’t doing too badly. The Liberals, the Greens and the NDP are all actively showing up and listening to young people. The Conservatives — perhaps distracted by their leadership race and by a long-held belief that young people won’t vote for them anyway — aren’t. (Conservatives could attract young voters if they put the work in, but that’s a topic for another column.)

When Prime Minister Trudeau watched a group of young people turn their backs on him at a recent Q&A session, his most telling comment was the one he made as he left the stage: “I will see you next year.” Despite a tense exchange, his commitment to youth engagement remains clear — even when it isn’t easy.

There are some policy issues where young Canadians and older Canadians share similar views. There are others — like the environment — where we see a stark division between generations. A poll earlier this year by EKOS said that young Canadians worry more about the environment than the economy. A government’s degree of engagement with the priorities of young voters can be determined by how it addresses these policy issues where public opinion is divided by age.

More telling still is how the government spends. The national organization Generation Squeeze put it bluntly in their communications on the 2016 budget: ‘More Hope for Older Middle Class than Younger Middle Class’. According to their calculations, “the Liberal government will spend over $21,000 per person age 65+; over $7,300 per person age 45 to 64; and around $4,550 per person under age 45.” Governments set priorities with money: The more public money flows to the priorities of young people, the more the government wants to keep its share of the youth vote.

Protesters getting detained on the Hill, a few young people turning their backs on the PM — these things don’t necessarily signal a full-on revolt by millennials against the current government. But it could be a sign of things to come.

Having grown up in an era of slick marketing campaigns, millennials have a highly accurate ‘bullshit detector’. Rehearsed talking points and empty promises don’t move them. Neither does being told not to call out contradictions when they see them. As one young person who attended the event with Trudeau put it, “We are told to speak truth to power, then they put power in front of us and they expect us to sit quietly.”

The Liberals would be wise to think about how much young voters matter to their re-election strategy in 2019. If they do matter, they should stop asking young people to be polite. Instead, they should respect their right to be politically engaged — and make sure young people see the impact of that engagement reflected in policy and budget priorities.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Author

Ilona Dougherty is the managing director of the Youth and Innovation Research Project at the University of Waterloo. She co-founded the national charity Apathy is Boring, is an Ashoka Fellow and in 2015 was named one of the Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada by the Women’s Executive Network.